As well as the base material for blacksmithing and jewelcrafting, you can also transmute it into other stuff (like trillium, living steel, etc)

Hey, crafted PvP gear sells really well. Who would have thought?

So I made a ton on crafting and selling PvP gear until I got bored of it because I had more gold than I needed. (Which is the entire story of my ventures into the economy on any game, I can never feel motivated after I have enough.) Living steel is fairly cheap on the auction house so it’s still easier to sell crafted PvP gear and use the profits to buy anything else you might need. Life is good.

And then comes patch 5.2, which continues on the whole “hey guys, our entire economy is based on Ghost Iron these days” theme by adding a bunch of entirely new demand for the stuff.

1. A new PvP/ Arena season. This means that the PvP crafted gear gets a bump in iLvL to help starting players (not a huge bump: its going from 450 to 458). Typically what Blizzard have done in the past is leave the recipes alone but have them produce higher iLvL gear with a slightly different name. So as a blacksmith, you don’t actually have to do much to take advantage of this. However, you really don’t want to be left with old stock when the recipe is upgraded.

Often there is a surge of demand for crafted gear when a new season starts. I don’t know if that will be the case this time, it hasn’t really been improved much. But best to assume this might happen again.

2. Large demand for trillium as part of the Wrathion legendary questline. The next stages of this quest are rumoured to require people to hand in 40 trillium bars. Blizzard have been known to tweak files in between the test server and a live patch drop to encourage people not to hoard, but if this is true then there is about to be a huge demand on trillium. Which means a demand for Ghost Iron by alchemists queueing up to turn the stuff into trillium.

(I personally feel the cheapest way to get your trillium is to buy white/black trillium on the cheap and make up the spares by spending Spirits of Harmony at the vendor because a lot of people do not have miners and don’t know how to combine black/white ore to get trillium bars. Also white trillium has been cheap for ages.)

3. Blizzard are tweaking Blacksmithing, and making it possible to level the tradeskills from scratch in Pandaria, using only Ghost Iron as a material. Players have realised for awhile that tradeskills haven’t really been in synch with the new levelling curve – it takes a bit of effort and going out of your way to keep tradeskills up to date while you level now. So it may not really be surprising if Blizzard decided to provide shortcuts, in the same way that they did with cooking. As a crafter, this makes me a bit sad; I quite liked that there was an advantage to knowing where to gather all the materials you might need to level a tradeskill. Although I imagine more hardcore players on large servers just buy it all from the AH.

As a miner, it makes me think that the price of Ghost Iron is going to go through the roof.

4. And you’ll also need a bunch of Ghost Iron to make the new Lightning Steel material that is going to be used to craft new blacksmithing recipes in the next patch. I’m not all that excited by any recipes that I have seen, as it’s mostly iLvL 463 (blue) weapons that can be transmogged to look like Burning Crusade weapons. I never thought that BC was really the weapons high point of the game, but your mileage may vary.

This isn’t really a gold guide, and if I need more in game gold I’ll probably just keep selling crafted PvP gear. But it’s intriguing to see Blizzard deliberately driving the economy like this. I can only imagine what will happen when they eventually bring in legendary gems (these recipes usually appear a few patches into an expansion) which are bound to be based on Ghost Iron too.

So you want to be a blacksmith? Congratulations, it might not be the best trade for making lots of gold, and it could be easier to kit out through drops than from gear you make yourself, but it’s a solid tradeskill. The perks (extra sockets for gloves and bracers) are as good as anything in the game, and it’s much less work than Inscription or Jewelcrafting.

And if you are trade minded, you can keep yourself in pocket money handily by selling Blacksmithed goods. I am going to run through the various items that sell best for me, but first a word about the neat design of Pandaria tradeskills.

The economy of Ghost Iron

If you are a miner, you will know by now that it is barely possible to go two steps in Pandaria without tripping over a Ghost Iron node. Ghost Iron, the base material for Pandarian blacksmithing, is plentiful. The economy around tradeskills at the moment is based on high demand AND high supply. So even though the iron is abundant, demand always just about outstrips it. As the base material for multiple different tradeskills and transmutes, players have a wide variety of options of what to do with their Ghost Iron. I’ll run through some of the options. Bear in mind that which of these is optimal is going to depend on your goals and the market on your server.

Sell it. Because Ghost Iron is in high demand, you can sell it in either ore or bar form on the auction house.

Get a Jewelcrafter to turn it into gems. JCs nuke ghost iron and receive pandarian gems. These can then be cut or used to make jewelry.

Get a Blacksmith to turn it into gear to sell. People will buy level 85 gear for characters going to Pandaria, or PvP gear for their level 90s. There are also recipes on various vendors for blue level 90 tanking gear, and for blue weapons.

Get an Engineer to turn it into gear to sell. Engineers can make trinkets and various other devices that might fetch a decent price on the market.

Get a JC/BS/Engineer to make a blue item, and then get an enchanter to disenchant it for shards. Occasionally there is a recipe for a blue item that is cheap in terms of materials.

Get an Alchemist to transmute it into Trillium and/or Living Steel. Living Steel is used to make some epic recipes at the moment, and is also used for Pandarian belt buckles. An Alchemist can turn 6 stacks of Ghost Iron ore into one bar of Living Steel. Depending on your server’s market, it may be cheaper to sell the iron and buy Living Steel from the AH.

I find this a fun piece of design because all of those options may be viable, and which is the best can change quite frequently. It is also quite fascinating because at least two of these options (Alchemy and Jewelcrafting) remove Ghost Iron from the game in large amounts compared to the amount of materials they produce. So if you are buying up Ghost Iron to turn into Living Steel, relax in the knowledge that the Jewelcrafters probably all hate you.

Me and Blacksmithing

The key recipes to pick up are the blue PvP ones, and the belt buckle. All of those things will sell steadily all through an expansion. Invest the Spirits of Harmony to pick all of them up. In Cataclysm, Blizzard automatically updated the stats on the PvP recipes with each new season and we have no reason to think they won’t do the same here, so it’s very worthwhile.

At the moment, I’m finding I make more gold out of turning my Ghost Iron into PvP gear and selling it than I could from transmuting into Trillium/ Living Steel. But it is the beginning of the PvP season, and lots of people are also reaching the level cap and using PvP gear to help them reach the iLvL for heroics, so demand is particularly high. The blue PvE (tanking and healing) gear is more expensive to make, as it requires Trillium, but doesn’t seem to have as much demand so may not be worth the effort.

Another key recipe for the future will be the PvP plate bracers, which requires 5 bars of Ghost Iron to produce a blue pair of bracers that will disenchant into a shard if you are lucky. This is likely to be one of the cheapest ways to produce enchanting materials at the moment.

The epic recipes currently need 8 Spirit of Harmony each, which limits how often they can be made. I also suspect that by the time I can make any for anyone except myself, they will effectively have been outpaced by raid finder gear. They may well still fetch decent amounts, but whether it’s really the best thing to do with Living Steel I don’t know.

Belt buckles will sell for decent prices, from my initial experiments, so are likely a better bet. (Decent meaning you could buy the raw materials from the AH, turn it into Living Steel, turn that into a belt buckle, and pretty much double your investment.) I have had some success in selling Weapon Chains also, although if you have any Pyrium left in the bank, those Weapon Chains can still be attached to level 90 weapons so this is a good time to offload it.

Markco invited me to join his gold blogging carnival a few months back and I declined politely, on the ground that I don’t really focus much on making gold so didn’t think I’d have much to suggest that they didn’t all know already.

Today, I’ll make an exception. Some of these may be server specific, but I suspect the general trends are not. These are things I’ve been making good profits on recently – I make no claim for these as long term money makers:

1/ Pyrium Bars – requires maxed mining. Buy two pieces of Pyrite ore, smelt them, put the Pyrium bar on the Auction House at a decent mark up (on my server that’s about 400% at the moment). I presume these sell to alchemists who want to do their profitable Truegold transmute but don’t know anyone who can smelt the pyrite.

2/ Blue PvP gear. The profits on this basically covered the material costs for me levelling blacksmithing from 510-max. In particular, once you have maxed it, buy either the PvP hat or legs recipe and sell those, because most maxed blacksmiths don’t bother. I’ve been selling the PvP legs for 2k gold per piece.

3/ Ebonsteel Belt buckle. Yes, apparently people really will pay stupid prices just for a single extra gem slot. I had originally planned to make a load and undercut heavily but there doesn’t seem much point when I can sell all the ones I make at around 1600g each.

The price of ore seems to have settled as much as it is going to in the short term so I decided I might as well level up Blacksmithing. (If you are looking for a guide for levelling Blacksmithing, this is as good as any. The only place I disagree is that I’d make Pyrium Weapon Chains from 500-510.)

Every time I raise the skill by another point I feel like a prize idiot. It’s expensive in terms of materials, and you barely have any consumables to sell. I would never recommend this tradeskill to a new player. I have never seen any other blacksmith recommend it either. The only thing it really has going for it at the moment is that Blizzard didn’t put any higher level Cataclysm recipes for sockets, so if you just want extra sockets for your gloves and wrists, you don’t actually need to level blacksmithing past 400.

Especially when jewelcrafters make tons of gold, have lots of different gem cuts to sell, have daily quests and can also make really good trinkets for themselves. It’s not remotely on par. They also tend to drive up the price of ore, because they can make more money from it than blacksmiths can on the whole. This is why it’s a pain in the arse to have to share raw crafting materials with a more profitable profession.

Having said that, if you are crafting then you should be selling PvP gear at the moment. The new arena season has just started. This is about the only time you’ll get good prices for blue PvP gear so make the most of it. I sold some blue plate gloves for 2k yesterday. And don’t forget the weapon chains, which are fairly cheap to make too.

But I want to go back to the crazy material requirements to level blacksmithing. Obsidium, the lower level Cataclysm ore, has been in short supply recently. Blacksmiths require 4 pieces of ore to make 1 piece of folded obsidium, which is the base material for levelling blacksmithing to 500ish. So when you see a recipe that requires 20 folded obsidium, you’re looking at 4 stacks of ore. Oh, and it won’t sell for anything remotely near the cost of that ore because most people will realise that if they keep questing they will probably get a better quest reward eventually.

But wait, it gets better. Once you hit 500, you need to buy all your recipes with large amounts of elementium ore. Granted, some of them are PvP blues which sell well at the moment. Others are epics which all require truegold (available on a 24 hour alchemy cooldown) and chaos orbs (BoP drop from the end boss of a heroic), and lots of volatile element drops. It’s fine that epics are supposed to be difficult, but I wonder how many players will be willing to pay the sort of prices that would incur. Mind you, someone just paid me 2k for some blue PvP gauntlets so who knows? Only one way to find out. (Incidentally, if you are a tank or melee dps, pick the caster epic recipes if you want people to run heroics with you to help get ‘their’ obs. If you are dps or healer, pick the tanking epics. etc.)

Bottom line is that for crafting professions at the moment – blacksmithing, tailoring, leatherworking – the material requirements to level the skill are pretty high. There are fewer zones than in previous expansions in which to compete with other gatherers if you want to gather your own. And volatiles in particular can only be farmed in a few places. So if you aim to make gold via gathering, expect a lot of competition. (Having said that, I am getting pretty good at the Obsidium circuit in Vash’jir.)

And also, Blizzard doesn’t really care that some professions are simply better than others for making gold. Jewelcrafting has been good ever since it was introduced. Alchemy looks to have been given some perks this expansion too, with the very desirable truegold transmute (in the last expansion, miners had the equivalent) and they also have options to transmute volatiles, and presumably will be able to transmute epic gems when those get introduced.

Anyone having better luck with their professions?

Cataclysm Screenshot of the Day

This was taken inside the Vortex Pinnacle, a 5 man instance which is all about the element of air. Those teeny black things in the middle are our characters running back after a wipe. It’s hard to really do justice to the scale of this place, it’s gorgeous.